CHAPTER XVI.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JAY GOULD.

Much of the interest in the life and career of Mr. Gould is in regard to his personal characteristics and qualifications, and much that is to be learned from his life is to be gained from the study of the same circumstances. The varying opinions regarding him are perhaps more widely different than those concerning any other great financier. As has been said, there are those who see in him all that was ideal in the character of a powerful money monarch. There are more whose criticisms can not be made too scathing, whose denunciations can not be made too strong. In an impartial history, all such opinions must be represented.

It is a relief to turn from the record of Gould’s public career to the contemplation of his private life. As has already been said, in all his domestic relations Gould was a model man. He had no habits but that of hard work and home enjoyments. He did not use tobacco in any form. He rarely, if ever, sipped a glass of wine. Social scandal never attached to his name. He loved his home. When not in his office he was with his family. He owned a box at the opera, but when he attended his family always accompanied him. He belonged to no social clubs. He did not add the excitement of the turf to the excitement of the Stock Exchange. On his return from a journey his first questions were of the welfare of his family. He made his home as beautiful as wealth, refinement and purity could make it. He loved his children, the sweet discourse of the fireside and the companionship of books and flowers. There was no attempt at display, but everything he possessed was the best. Neither he nor his wife had any ambition for society distinction. They gave no great balls and rarely were they present at “society events.” They had none of the vulgar traits of the parvenu or prejudices of the aristocrat. When his son wished to marry an actress Mr. Gould interposed no objection, and even approved the choice, declaring his pleasure that his son had selected a respectable woman who was able to earn her own living. Perhaps his devotion to his family was due in part to the fact that his public career placed him apart from other men and made him an object of fear and hatred. He was an exile from the sympathies of his fellowmen. But he uttered no complaint, and found in his family full solace for any loss of friendships he may have incurred. The members of his family were his only intimate friends.

Mr. Gould was never a robust person. He was below medium height, thin, nervous and reticent. His hair, beard and eyes were jet black. He was fastidious in dress, and never approached the gaucheries that marked and marred his lieutenant, Fisk. Gould was all brain and nerve, Fisk all drive and muscle. Although quiet, imperturbable and indisposed to confidences, Mr. Gould’s expression was by no means unpleasant. On the contrary he was, in a sense, companionable. He was extremely fond of home comforts and never permitted business to interfere with his two o’clock dinner or his afternoon drive. In manner he was kind and gentle. Never averse to give an opinion, unless it interfered with a plan, he was careful not to obtrude one. He was not accessible to strangers for obvious reasons, but his family and friends testify to the unvarying courtesy of his manner and the rare beauty of his temper. He was always more or less troubled with sleeplessness and often paced the floor, tearing letters or papers to bits, as he thought out schemes for making money. Making money was his passion. He was not ostentatious in living and spent comparatively little. He rarely put his name on subscription papers and, justly or not, he did not enjoy the reputation of liberality. He was often seen in the park with his wife, his son or driver, and invariably looked straight ahead. He ate moderately and never drank wine save at dinner. Now and then he attended the opera, and in the days of Sweeny and Tweed would occasionally join them in the recesses of a private box. Mr. Gould was not exactly a selfish man. He was too intelligent to hate and too unsympathetic to love very strongly. He produced the impression of extreme intellectuality; indeed, leaving out the affectionate element, he was feminine in nature, with marked intuitive perceptions.

Slight of stature and frame, and feeble in body, with a high-strung, nervous organization, a rebellious stomach and flesh-plagued with the neuralgia--such was Mr. Gould as he appeared in the later years of his life. His deceit and far-reaching were the result, largely, of his frailty and timidity. In appearance what a meek, mild-looking man he was! Strangers to whom he was pointed out would exclaim: “What, that Jay Gould! Well, I never would have thought it.” About five feet six inches in height and of slender figure, he was not an imposing personage. His complexion was swarthy, his eyes dark and piercing; his closely-trimmed whiskers black and streaked with gray; his forehead dome-shaped and his hair rather thin--such was Jay Gould. His voice was very low and mild. When a witness in courts and before committees, as he frequently was, it was with the greatest difficulty that he could be heard. But when once in close contact with him one soon came under the spell of his intellect. His comprehension was wide, his intuition wonderful, his judgment almost unerring. He was a close student when once he took up a subject. He never ceased until he had thoroughly mastered it in every detail. This was the secret of his success. Henry Ward Beecher once defined genius as the power and willingness to work long and hard, and under this definition Mr. Gould was a man of genius. Though not by any means wholly bad, he was a dangerous man. His life was a menace to his country. His successes were demoralizing to the young. He looked like a premium on dishonesty, a reversal of the old adage that “honesty is the best policy.”

No just estimate of Mr. Gould can be formed without taking into consideration the fact that he lived in a time and country in which corruption in politics and business was widespread. The great mass of the people were honest, but municipal government was the most corrupt ever known. Bribery walked the streets of the national and state capitals, and “jobs” were behind nearly every public undertaking. It was a period, on the one hand, of glorious achievement and extraordinary development, and, on the other hand, of venality, deceit and dishonesty. The besetting temptation of the times was the desire to get rich--enormously rich--suddenly. Mr. Gould may be said to have been little if any worse than most of his contemporaries in business. His triumphs were, for the most part, over men who would have ruined him if he had not ruined them.

In regard to himself, he once said when told that he was the most unpopular man in the United States:

“I never notice what is said about me. I am credited with things I have never done and abused for them. It would be idle to attempt to contradict newspaper talk and street rumors. As to enemies, any man in my position is likely to have them. With me the bitterest enemies have always proved to be men to whom I had rendered services. As a general thing, I do my best to be on good terms with everybody I come in contact with. I am not of a quarrelsome disposition. But, on the other hand, I have the disadvantage of not being sociable. Wall street men are fond of company and sport. A man makes $100,000 there and immediately buys a yacht, begins to drive fast horses, and becomes a sport generally. My tastes lie in a different direction. When business hours are over I go home and spend the remainder of the day with my wife, my children, and the books of my library. Every man has natural inclinations of his own. Mine are domestic. They are not calculated to make me particularly popular in Wall street, and I cannot help that.”

The day after his death, his friends had only one word to say as to the qualities in the dead man which commanded a tribute from them--his ability, his foresight, his wonderful patience in the working out of his aims, his fidelity to friends, his good faith with his business associates and his generosity to subordinate workers. Mr. Morosini, speaking of his dead friend and former employer, with whom he had been associated for a longer period, and perhaps more continuously and in some respects more intimately, than any other man in New York, said:

“Mr. Gould was one of the most lovable men I ever knew. It was a pleasure to serve him. He was very appreciative, and never imposed a needless task upon any one. In the office he always took things easily and coolly. There was never any hurry or confusion. In his family he was the best of husbands, and I never knew a man who loved his children with such intensity as he did. He seemed to worship them all. He was a very companionable man, and there was a great deal of humor in his disposition. While he was not given to telling stories or cracking jokes himself, he enjoyed hearing others do so and would laugh as heartily as the rest. He was very abstemious in his habits, but was exceptionally fond of coffee. Now and then he would sip a little wine, but he rarely took more than a spoonful at any time. My opinion is that his system gave way under the great strain resulting from the consciousness of his immense wealth. It was a tremendous care, and he was always weighed down with the anxiety and excitement of protecting his properties.

“Mr. Gould was the most generous of men, and he made a great many other men rich by his own generosity. I could give you hundreds of instances where in return for some slight service to him he has started men in the way of making fortunes. There is one which just comes to mind while I am talking which is a good illustration. Once there was a man out West who did some little work for Mr. Gould in a railroad matter there. The man was of the ordinary type of a Westerner on the frontier. Mr. Gould said to me: ‘I ought to do something for him; what would you suggest?’ I replied, ‘Buy him a thousand shares of stock for a rise.’ He said, ‘All right,’ and ordered the purchase of 1,000 shares of Denver and Rio Grande. The stock was then about 29. We carried it along until it reached a very high point and looked like going off, and then we sold it. The profit was $65,000 and I paid that money, all of it, sixty-five bills of $1,000 each, to that man myself. Mr. Gould had ordered that transaction for that particular purpose. He took none of the profit himself, but directed that the man should have it all.

“There were many instances,” continued Mr. Morosini, “of just that sort, and many in which he greatly helped men there in Wall street from going down--men whom he was under no obligation to help, but he assisted them under an impulse of generosity.”

In regard to Mr. Gould’s business methods, Mr. Morosini said: “Of course, he was very reserved. He never let the left hand know what the right hand did. His motto was never to say ‘cat’ until you had him in the bag. For instance, he asked me one day to call in about $8,000,000--which we had loaned out. I followed his instructions; the money was collected; he said nothing to anybody about why he had called it in. I kept the money for nearly a month, when one day he told me that I might loan it out again, as he had no more use for it; that he had intended it for use in buying the Reading road, but the deal had fallen through and therefore it might as well be drawing interest. That was the first I knew of what he had in contemplation when he called the money in. Then again, when he bought the Missouri Pacific, his negotiations with Commodore Garrison were carried on for three months, and it was only when he asked me to draw checks and told me to whom they should be drawn that the whole thing came out.”

Continuing, Mr. Morosini said: “Mr. Gould could enjoy immensely anything funny or ludicrous. We used to have a small window in the office through which I would talk to some of the unimportant callers, and through which Mr. Gould would also talk to people whom it was not necessary to bring into the inner room. One day a man came to the window and said, ‘I want to see Mr. Gould.’ I told him he could not see Mr. Gould unless he told me what he wanted. He replied, ‘I have an invention here, and there’s millions to be made out of it.’ Mr. Gould was in the next room, and he said, ‘Morosini, what is it the man wants?’ and I told him, whereupon he got up and came to the window to talk to the man.

“When Mr. Gould appeared, the man put his hand under his coat as if to pull something out. I saw it glisten, and thinking it was a blunderbuss, I dodged down under the counter, and Mr. Gould seeing me go down dropped down also. ‘Shoot high, you son of a gun,’ I yelled out. Then the man laughed and said there was nothing to fear, and began to explain the nature of his invention. We got up and looked at it, and what do you think it was? He had a sort of a brass cylinder, and he said it was a patent portable churn. It was to be filled with cream in the morning when a man was starting away from home, and slung by a strap over his shoulder under his coat. The motion of the body while walking would keep the cream stirring, and then besides there was a sort of piston with a handle on the top. Every now and then you were to give that a jerk, so that by the time the man reached home at night he could turn out on a plate for his wife a pound or two of fresh butter.

“I said to the man when he had explained what the thing was, ‘I will give you thirty days in the penitentiary,’ and you ought to see him get out. It would have done you good to see Mr. Gould laugh over our dropping down behind that counter at the sight of that portable churn.”

Mr. Morosini illustrated Mr. Gould’s peculiar tactics in operations in some particular stock in the Exchange with another anecdote. Said he:

“At one time Mr. Gould was short on Pacific Mail, and he bought and sold, bought and sold, bought and sold until the commissions paid brokers amounted to about $36,000. Then the account was finally made up and showed to the credit of Mr. Gould on the entire transaction the sum of fourteen cents. A rumor was in circulation that Mr. Gould had made a great deal of money in the stock. One afternoon, just about that time, I was at Mr. Gould’s house when William H. Vanderbilt called to see him about some matter of business. He congratulated Mr. Gould on having made so much money on the stock. Mr. Gould turned to me and said, ‘Morosini, how much have we made on that deal in Pacific Mail?’

“I answered, ‘$140,000.’

“‘What,’ he exclaimed, and looked at me in a queer way. After Mr. Vanderbilt had gone Mr. Gould said, ‘When I asked you what we had made on that Pacific Mail transaction why did you say we had made $140,000?’ I answered, ‘Did we want to disgrace ourselves by saying fourteen cents? Why not let them know that we can make money as well as they can?’ Mr. Gould was very much amused.”

Those men who of late have been most intimately associated in business with Mr. Gould, and those directly connected with the business enterprises of which he was the commanding power, invariably speak of him in the highest terms. The directors of the Manhattan Elevated Railway, the Western Union Telegraph Company, the Missouri Pacific System, and other great corporations in which Mr. Gould’s holdings of stock were the controlling interests, have been lavish in the compliments and admiration which they express.

Newspapers throughout the country, in their editorials, seem to have made every effort to be kind, even while expressing, most of them, detestation for Mr. Gould’s methods. In the public press, however, he has had few compliments except for his shrewdness and his family life, while criticisms have been very severe on all of the prominent features of his career.

A great number of clergymen, too, have taken occasion to preach sermons on the death of Mr. Gould, some of them very bitter in their denunciation of him. A few have been charitable enough to object entirely to the fact that he made little application of his wealth toward benevolences, and have said little about his methods of acquiring it.

It is true, however, that the weight of the consensus of opinion has been that Jay Gould’s life was that of a wrecker of fortunes and of honor, that the good that he is done falls far short of balancing the account, and that his loss will be felt less by the world at large than would that of any other man of equal prominence.